Zoe was conscious of a strong wish that both Princess Emilia and her mother-in-law would confine themselves to their own affairs, but as nothing would satisfy the former but that she should immediately receive and refuse the formal proposal of Prince Romanos, without betraying any knowledge of his alleged perfidy, she went out into the garden again. A graceful figure in white, with a large parasol, passed her on the steps of the terrace, and Zoe thought with surprise that she had never known before that Donna Olimpia disliked her. Perhaps she was jealous of her Princess’s favour for the stranger. On the terrace was Prince Romanos, leaning in an interesting attitude upon the marble balustrade. He turned with a start as she appeared at the top of the steps, and she wondered once more that this poseur, with his instinctive knowledge of the artistic effect of his every word and action, should even care to enter upon the rough-and-tumble strife for supremacy in Emathia, and far more that he should be able to intervene with the decision and shrewdness he had already displayed. With a wave of the hand, as he met her, he indicated the view upon which he had been gazing.
“Is it not characteristic of this land of ours?” he asked her. “Hills barren almost to bareness, intersected by lines of unsurpassable verdure wherever water is to be found. Do we not see in it also a type of the Emathian character, Princess—strength, even rigidity of outline, united with a peculiar tenderness in the region of the affections?”
“How very original!” said Zoe, much entertained as she realised the accomplished way in which he was leading up to the performance of his task. “In those few words you have given me quite a new view of the Emathian nature.”
“Have you not studied it too little, Princess? Forgive my suggesting it, but don’t you isolate yourself unduly from your own race,—from its Greek portion, at any rate? A closer knowledge—the companionship of one who would as humbly teach as he would proudly learn from you—might not this——?”
He paused, with speaking eyes fixed upon her face, and she perceived that he had so thrown himself into his part that for the moment he was living in it. The dramatic strain in her own nature responded to his success.
“Some people are too old to learn,” she replied, with a touch of suitable melancholy; “and some have already had such hard lessons that they don’t care to take more.”
“But not such natures as yours, Princess! Or at least your kind heart would overrule the promptings of your wounded spirit. I also have suffered. We are linked by the kinship of sorrow; why not then——”
“Stop, rascal!” The startling words, in Greek, broke in upon the murmured conference, causing Prince Romanos to spring away from Zoe, of whose hand he had been trying to possess himself. Across the stage—this was how Zoe, already impressed with the theatrical nature of the occasion, phrased it to herself—swaggered a venerable gentleman who might have stepped out of an opera, so gay was he with stiff white kilt, embroidered jacket and tasselled cap, and so warlike with his sashful of bristling weapons.
“You, lord!” responded Prince Romanos mechanically.
“Yes, I!” replied the apparition, speaking now in bad but vigorous French, evidently for Zoe’s benefit; “and it is high time I came. I find my only son, the heir to the imperial heritage, saying soft things to a schismatic woman, who hopes to beguile him into marrying her.”